David Michael Miller
Abigail Julius has been in Madison about a month. The 54-year-old came to Madison from Menominee looking for help. “There were no resources up there like they have down here.”
Since she’s been here, she’s staked a spot out in front of the City County Building, where she keeps her stuff and sleeps on a concrete bench each night. Although she feels safe, she does worry about people taking her things. Sometimes, drunk people will steal her bedding, she says.
Julius has grown increasingly wary of another person, as well. Mayor Paul Soglin has escalated his campaign against a segment of the homeless population, pushing draconian measures intended to disperse them.
He’s proposed an ordinance that would limit the time spent sitting on public benches or sidewalks in downtown to one hour between 5:30 a.m. and 1 a.m., with a $100 fine for a first offense. And on Monday, he ordered city workers to remove the art installation in Philosopher’s Grove at the top of State Street, where many homeless individuals and others congregate.
Julius wishes he’d spend his energy aiding the homeless, instead of hassling them.
“Being the mayor, he has the authority to at least try to help the homeless people,” she says. “There are empty buildings just sitting there while there are people sleeping in the streets.”
The mayor counters that the city spends millions each year on homelessness, but that it needs to also enforce rules and order. In a news conference Monday, he described this as the “Rights and recognition of the dignity of a homeless person, but with rules and responsibilities.”
He added: “There’s got to be some responsibility on the part of the homeless community and, more importantly, those who are servicing them.”
Although Soglin returned to office in 2011 on a platform of fighting poverty, his tenure has been marked by clashes with the homeless community. This included a spring 2012 dust-up with Occupy Madison, which had a temporary encampment on East Washington Avenue. Occupy members asked the city to let it stay permanently — either there or on some other vacant city parcel.
Soglin, and the Common Council, refused. The city later fined a property owner who let the group camp on his land.
Of late, the mayor has taken to lecturing the council about the issue. He sends emails to alders that include photographs he’s taken of drunk people passed out in public spots or news reports of fights and assaults.
Ald. Ledell Zellers, who represents part of downtown, finds these emails unproductive. “I probably see this stuff more than most people because I’m walking through the downtown several times a day,” she says. “I absolutely agree that there’s a problem. I’d like to see more collaboration on a strategy. I’m not sure the mayor’s approach is going to get us there, with the banning of sitting on city benches.”
Soglin also vetoed the council’s action declaring the homeless a protected class of citizens. In a June 16 debate on whether to override the veto, Soglin reiterated his message that “compassion without rules is a failure.”
He went on to note that picnic benches had recently been removed from behind the Municipal Building, because people have been caught having sex on them.
“If you and your partner enjoy it on the kitchen table after the kids have gone to bed or are gone for the day, that’s just fine,” Soglin told the council. “But I really don’t think it’s appropriate to do it on someone else’s table.”
Ald. David Ahrens finds Soglin’s rhetoric bewildering. “The points to which he obsesses about — the same talk over and over again about defecation and fornication — it’s weird. It’s simply weird,” he says. “It’s this very moral values-laden judgment that really does nothing to address what the problem is.”
“Is this something new that drunken people act terribly sometimes and commit crimes?” Ahrens wonders. “He’s been mayor of the city for 40 years; is this new?”
Ahrens isn’t alone in finding the mayor’s behavior bizarre.
Several council members — including Larry Palm, Zellers, Ahrens and council president Denise DeMarb — say the mayor regularly watches live feeds of security cameras the city has installed at places where homeless people tend to congregate, including Philosopher’s Grove, Lisa Link Peace Park and the “concrete park,” which is the area where Frances Street ends at State Street.
Brenda Konkel, a former alder and homeless advocate, has seen the mayor watching the video as well. “Every time I go to the [mayor’s] office, he watches the video of the police cameras then stops the meeting and points out what is happening and has crazy stories about what he thinks is going on,” she says.
Konkel knows people Soglin points out and says her knowledge of their situation doesn’t match the mayor’s stories. “He assumes people are doing drugs when they probably have a mental illness.”
“This is really bizarre behavior for the leader of a city,” Konkel adds. “It’s not rational, and it’s not the values he typically shows. Normally when there’s a problem, he talks to the stakeholders. [With this] he can’t seem to listen to anybody.”
Palm also finds the behavior odd. “I walk into his office to talk to him, his screen saver is a picture of a vodka bottle,” says Palm. “It’s a liter vodka bottle he found on the grass [and photographed].”
“He’s obsessed about this,” Palm adds. “He has mental capacity that is broad. So I don’t think he [can only] focus on one thing. But he’s spending an inordinate amount of time on homelessness.”
Although the mayor has few allies on the council with his homeless strategy, he has at least one.
Ald. Paul Skidmore, who works as a security guard for several downtown businesses, supports Soglin’s approach.
“I’m somewhat amazed that my colleagues feel the way they do. This is an issue of behavior,” Skidmore says. “We don’t tolerate this behavior anywhere else in the city; why do we tolerate it downtown?”
In doing his late-night, early-morning rounds of State Street businesses, Skidmore says he’s seen all manner of awful behavior. In addition to fighting and aggressive panhandling, he’s seen “used condoms, feces, urine, urine on the wall, in the doorway.”
Cracking down on these actions, Skidmore adds, doesn’t mean officials are heartless. “If we control bad behavior by a handful of individuals, we’re not turning our back on the homeless.”
He notes that the city is working on providing affordable housing with an emphasis on “housing first,” including a 60-unit project being built on Rethke Avenue on the city’s east side. Skidmore says he’d like to see a similar development in every aldermanic district and is pushing for one in his own.
While others give the mayor credit for funding the Rethke development, they wish he would do more planning and collaboration and less lecturing.
“We really need to come up with a strong positive plan that does the carrot then the stick,” Palm says. “We can’t say ‘you can’t stay here and then later on we’ll come up with a place to put you.’”
Konkel fears the mayor’s constant complaining about the homeless will make it more difficult to site shelters and affordable housing. “The neighborhoods are going to be concerned because he’s saying terrible things about the homeless,” she says.
In his news conference Monday, Soglin says he’s committed to funding projects like Rethke, but the help can’t come without strings attached. He called out homeless advocates as enablers of bad behavior.
“Those who are acting to support the homeless, you’ve got to insist that if you want our help, there has to be changes in behavior.”
